[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, we . . . I told you why we went to Washington, and that's all on the tape. And we got to Washington in the early summer of 1933 and Cliff had already gone up ahead, you see, and was staying with Sister and Hugo. And they had a house out in Northeast Washington, a very nice house. We only had one child then, you know, Lula, I mean Ann. And she was about six years old. So we stayed with the Blacks, oh I suppose a week or two, until we got an apartment close by them in one of those great big apartments on Wisconsin Avenue. We got a furnished apartment. And I began looking around for a house, a place to live. Cliff was making during the Depression time, seemed a pretty good salary—I think it was 6500 dollars a month. We thought that was—during the Depression— was a pretty good salary. And I didn't want to live in Washington. I wanted to live out in the country, [unknown] , or somewhere in the suburbs anyway, on account of Lula, I mean on account of Ann. They get furious because I get them mixed up. I call Ann Lula and Lula Ann. Living in this apartment was just awful because I was about twelve stories up and she would ride the elevator all the time. It she were down stairs I'd be frightened to death and so I was in a constant state of, you know, chasing her up and down, and going back and forth, and getting her, and worried to death about her. Sister was extremely nice to me. She was the one that, you know, took me out to the first party I described when I met Mrs. Roosevelt. She took me to all the things she went to, down to the Senate and the Congress. And I could leave Lula, leave Ann with—she had an old cook, or maid, named Mary Marble, who had worked for my mother. So I would just leave Lula down at the Blacks with Mary. But I was really anxious to get out in the country. And I had gone to Junior League Convention in Philadelphia. At that time I was Vice President of the Junior League of Birmingham, and

---

Page 2

I had met a very nice girl named Ann Green, I can't remember her middle name—Ann something Green. She was from Virginia, lived in Washington—a very nice, attractive girl. She was asking me where I was going to live when I got to Washington, and I said, well, I tell you, I just want to live sort of, the suburbs, out in the country, where people are nice and genteel but not very rich. Because I don't want to live in a very expensive neighborhood. And she laughed and said, well you described Seminary Hill. She said everybody out there is poor and genteel, which I thought was . . . well, I really took her seriously because I went back to Washington and began to look for a place to live and get out of this great big apartment. I called up a real estate agent and I said I'd like to go out and live in Seminary Hill, and she said, oh, my heavens, she said, there're never any houses to rent on Seminary Hill except in the summer. The professors go away for the summer and they rent their houses sometimes. But she said, I'll call up, but, very, very chancy business. So she did call up the Seminary and found that there was a house for rent which belonged to the Zabrisky's. He at that time—that's Zabriskie—he at that time was one of the professors at the Seminary, and he came from New York. He had a lovely wife named Mary Zabriskie, and they had this perfectly beautiful old house that was built in a kind of octagon shape, if you know what I mean, surrounded by oak trees. It was very nicely, beautifully, furnished. So I went out there and immediately rented that house, I think, for $75 a month, a furnished house—but that was just for the summer, you see. We moved out there and I had brought up with me from Alabama a nurse for my baby, you know, Ann. Her name was Celeste. She'd been a nurse for Ann for a long time. She was a very pretty black girl who had been married, a disastrous marriage, and she was glad to get away from Birmingham, because she was having trouble with her husband.

SUE THRASHER:

Did she have any children?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

No. She was a thin little thing. She was the niece of the sister of my nurse who was named Alice, the one who I told you

---

Page 3

about so much, that brought me up. And Alice's sister, who was named Mary, was the wash woman for the house, the whole household. And it was her niece who got the job of being nurse for my baby, Ann. After Ann was born I had two severe miscarriages. So Celeste was the sweetest kind of person, and I was very fond of her, but we hadn't been there very long when she got lonesome and wanted to go back. She didn't like the people in Washington, and she was lonesome and didn't know anybody and didn't know the right church to go to. So she left, after just a little while. So here I was in this beautiful old house in Virginia. And my husband was gone all the time. He'd go to work in the morning. He'd come home for a hurried dinner, and then he'd go back and work. He'd come back at two or three in the morning. They were trying to save the banks, you see. The telephone would ring in the night. He was waked up by people calling from every point of the compass saying if we don't get the money—you see he was with the RFC who was trying to save the banks—if you don't get the money here by tommrrow I'll commit suicide, and we'll all be ruined. You know he was working as hard as a man could possibly work. He couldn't work any harder. But the trouble was that sometimes they did commit suicide. That was the awful part about it, was that this desparate voice that would be calling all night . . . And they were working as hard as they could, but some of them did commit suicide.

SUE THRASHER:

Were these calls from all over the country?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

All over the country.

SUE THRASHER:

Banks?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Banks, people in the banks. See, they'd set up this big deposit insurance to save the banks. The banks were all closed after Roosevelt was elected. You couldn't get any money out of them at all. And so the government was putting money into the

---

Page 4

banks, trying to save the banks. They built up a big organization and they worked day and night, Saturday and Sunday. It was a real crisis. So I didn't see much . . .

SUE THRASHER:

Cliff was gone all the time?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Cliff was gone almost all the time.

SUE THRASHER:

Did you know very much about the work? Did he come home and talk about what was going on?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

If he wasn't too tired. He'd usually come home and go to sleep. He was in such a state of exhaustion all the time. It was like putting your finger in the dike. They were afraid the whole country was going to bankruptcy. It was the strangest kind of time. One funny experience we had which I thought was amusing because it was so unlike Cliff. Cliff, you know, was such a model of being a gentleman, having such good manners and very rarely did he show any irritation or anger or resentment against anybody. The head of the biggest bank in Birmingham, Alabama, where we had just come from, came up, and his bank was in bad trouble. So he thought he was an awful big shot and he went directly to Mr. Jesse Jones, who was head of the RFC, and wanted Mr. Jesse to handle his problem immediately. And Mr. Jones says, you'll have to go down and see Mr. Clifford Durr, who is head of the general counsel for the bank reorganization division. And so the man said, his name was Mr. Wells, he was a rather pompous man, had been very rich and very powerful because he'd been head of the biggest bank in Birmingham. And we had known him, but only slightly. And so he said to Mr. Jesse Jones, Oh, Mr. Jones, I couldn't deal with an underling like that, why that's just a local boy from Birmingham. You know, I want to deal with the big shot, in fact I think he thought Mr. Jesse Jones ought to get busy and draw up the papers himself. He said, well, if you don't deal with Clifford Durr, you just don't deal with anybody, because he happens to be the one, the lawyer, that's drawing up

---

Page 5

all these papers. So Mr. Jesse Jones called Cliff and said, Cliff, there's a man on the way to see you from Birmingham, named Mr. Wells. And he says he doesn't want to deal with you because you're just a local boy from Birmingham. And he said, you have to keep him waiting for a while. So Cliff did keep him waiting, I think an hour, sitting in there cooling his heels. But it was so unlike Cliff to do anything like that. Mr. Wells had been so arrogant, so scornful of having to deal with just a local boy.

SUE THRASHER:

Mr. Jones apparently had a lot of respect for Cliff.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Oh, yes, he thought Cliff . . . he had a tremendous amount of respect for Cliff, and Cliff liked him very much. I never did like him at all. I mean personally we just . . . ugh (?) He was a great big overpowering Texas man. He told nasty jokes. You know that kind of dirty jokes I feel like are so offensive to women, that make women the butt of . . . And he'd tell them . . . I just couldn't stand him infact. I never did like him. He had a poor, pitiful little wife who looked like she wore black dresses and knitted black shawls. She was the most pathetic little creature I've ever seen.

SUE THRASHER:

Did he tell jokes on her?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

No, he told jokes in front of her. But they were all sex jokes. I thought they were extremely bad taste and vulgar. I didn't like Mr. Jones at all, I mean just as a personal thing. But anyway, that summer I made friends on the Hill and the Dean of the Seminary was there. I was so fond of him. He was staying there. He was a widower. And his niece kept house for him, and she was so nice. There were a lot of people around the Hill that were very nice.

SUE THRASHER:

You're talking about Seminary Hill now?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Seminary Hill. It's right outside of Alexandria. It's where

---

Page 6

the Episcopal high school is and the Virginia Episcopal Seminary. It was a real neighborhood if you know what I mean. The roads weren't very good even out of Alexandria. There was a paved road from Alexandria to Washington, but from Alexandria out to Seminary Hill was just a gravel road. And they had a bus that ran twice a day. It was isolated, but it was a real neighborhood. Virginia, you know, has got marvelous manners—the people in Virginia have the most beautiful manners in the world, I think. Everybody called. They were the days when people called.

SUE THRASHER:

You mean called to visit, not call on the telephone?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Yes, they came to visit in the afternoons. You were supposed to be prepared for visitors in the afternoons and have iced tea ready and cookies and have on a light dress and be prepared to receive visitors. I could write a whole book about visitors from Seminary Hill because some of them were just absolutely incredible.

SUE THRASHER:

Well, tell us about them.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well. There was one old gentleman . . . The trouble is it was so long ago now that I'll have to look up my notes to think of the names and maybe I'd better not tell the names anyway. One day, night, we would take a walk . . . You've never seen Seminary Hill but it's just a perfectly beautiful place with the old brick buildings of the Seminary, the brick buildings to the Virginia Episcopal high school, and this is where the gentility of Virginia had gone for generations. They never would refer to it as . . . They would say "The High School," "The Seminary," and "The University." That meant the Virginia Episcopal High School, the Virginia Episcopal Theological Seminary, and the University of Virginia. But nobody ever said that. They would say, "The High School," "The Seminary," and "The University." And you were supposed to know what that was. So we would take a walk after supper at

---

Page 7

night and just walk around if Cliff was there. And even if Cliff wasn't there, Ann and I would take a little walk after supper in the grove and people would be strolling in the grove. One night we heard a conversation going on, it sounded like a very one-sided conversation. And we came up on Mr. Jim . . . The names will come back to me eventually. I'll just have to look back at all these various names. But they had an old house up there on Seminary Hill that they'd lived on for generations. He was talking to the trees. So we stopped and spoke to him, and he was extremely courteous and told us his name and where he lived and he said that he came out every night to talk to his trees, his friends the trees. Nobody regarded him as insane. They just said he was a little queer. Mr. Jim was just queer and he liked to talk to the trees and he'd come out every night and chat with them. He had favorite trees that he talked to. And you were just supposed to take this as a matter of course. Nobody was even, you know . . . Then there was another very odd, another couple had rented a house. They lived in Alexandria, but they'd come up to the Seminary to get out of the city, which was Alexandria, you see.. I don't suppose it's all so long ago. Their names were Herbert, and they were great aristocrats from Virginia, and in some way they were related to the Fairfaxes who had settled Virginia. It had been discovered that the Fairfax who lived in Virginia was the last Lord Fairfax. He'd gone back and claimed his patrimony. So he had taken Mr. Herbert, who was a bachelor, with him—he was a great friend of him—and for years he had lived there in England and been part of the British aristocracy. Lord Fairfax didn't have much money, but he did have the title, and maybe a castle. Anyway, Mr. Herbert had lived over there in England for many years with Lord Fairfax and then either Lord Fairfax fell on hard times or he did. He came back and was living with his three old-maid sisters, who had rented a house for the summer right across the road from where we were at the

---

Page 8

Labriskie's. They were very nice ladies that were very Virginian. And talked in that beautiful way, if you like the Virginia accent . . . "garden" and "Carter" you know. Everybody was so nice to us, you see. I look back on it now. They were so polite and sweet to us. So they would invite you to dinner, and they were just marvelous cooks, absolutely tremendously good cooks, but they didn't believe in eating cooked food. They all believed that you should only eat raw food. So they would offer you these delicious means of broiled chicken, you know, and puffed pastry and biscuits and corn pudding that was two feet high and they'd say, I hope you'll eat this, but I want you to understand that while you're eating it you're killing yourself. This is the kind of food that kills people. And they would be eating things like herb tea and bananas. Everything raw.

SUE THRASHER:

But they would fix all of this for their guests.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

They would fix this for their guests, really wonderful food, the most wonderful cooks, or they had a cook, I think. But they would be telling you the same time about the fact that it was all going to kill you. It was absolutely deadly cooked food . . . But, you see, nobody thought they were odd either; they were just taken as a matter of fact, too, they were [unknown] everybody just accepted the fact that they thought. . . .They would tell you these terrible tales about old cousin Annie who came to visit them and she was eighty-nine years old and she still seemed to be healthy. But you know that woman is killing herself. We took her out and do you know what she had for dinner? She ordered and ate a dead lobster. She was 89 years old and she was killing herself because she ordered and ate a dead lobster. But you know it was all taken for granted, if you know what I mean. Well, one of the reasons that people were so nice to us was that they had "placed" us, as they say in Virginia, or in the South. And the way they had placed us was this. We had no Virginia connection, and if you told them that your family had come from

---

Page 9

Virginia way back in 1797 or even 18 . . . My grandfather came down during the Revolutionary War from South Boston. But if you told anybody in Virginia who was a native and lived there all their lives, and their ancestors, that you came from Virginia, they always rather looked down on you because you moved away, and they couldn't imagine anybody ever leaving Virginia unless the sheriff was after them or some scandal had erupted because Virginia, you know, is a beautiful State. The old families who clustered around Seminary Hill and the Virginia Episcopal Theological Seminary, they knew everybody. Well, the reason what we were accepted to the degree that we were, and we really were accepted, was because the Dean of the Seminary had been a Dr. Crawford, and he had had two, several, beautiful daughters. One of them particularly beautiful name Alice Crawford. And she came down to Birmingham as the wife of an Episcopal minister. And my mother and she were friendly and I had known her, so they vouched for us, if you know what I mean. They had come back to Virginia and he was teaching in a Episcopal school somewhere in Virginia. His name was Randolph. And they were the bluest blood of the bluest blood of Virginia. And they had known my mother, and Mrs. Randolph was one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. I have seen many pretty women, but she was an absolute beauty. She had perfect features, masses of black hair. You very rarely see black hair that's wavy and curly and very shiney. And then she had lovely white skin and slender figure. She had been proposed to, we always understood, by every millionaire in the country, but she married Dr. Randolph, who was an Episcopal minister with whom she fell in love. She was a devoted wife to him because we got to know them quite well. He finally . . . He was the head of this Episcopal school somewhere in South Virginia, and he failed the son of the Bishop or he failed the son of some big contributor or he failed the sons of some very prominent people in the Episcopal Church. He wouldn't pass them. And there was a great to-do

---

Page 10

about it because he'd just fail them or expel them if they didn't do right. And so they told him that he was losing money for the school and losing money for the Episcopal Church, irritating the Board of Trustees. You know, he was a man of total integrity and honesty and so he kept on failing them. So they fired him. So he came up and lived in the little house next to us after we'd bought a house on Seminary Hill. And during the War he got a job in the torpedo factory. He'd go off in the mornings with a bucket, you know, a lunch basket in his hands. But I'm trying to give you a flavor of Seminary Hill. And Mrs. Randolph, who was this great beauty and who had been admired by all and . . . she would come out and empty the garbage. And I never will forget—she always wore gloves and always looked like, you know, her hair was fixed, beautifully dressed. She stuck by her husband very loyally. And Dr. Randolph was one of the loveliest men I ever knew, I've ever known. There is a strain in Virginia among all the Virginians that I met. There are lot of Virginians that I didn't like at all. But there is a strain in Virginia of men of integrity, you know, like Cliff, who're going to do right in spite of hell and high water. And he was one of them. And he did it in such a matter of fact way, if you know what I mean. And I would like to add that after the War was over and he got a job as the director of the church in Rome, Italy. And Mrs. Randolph went with him. And as I understand their latter years were, you know, they were very comfortable, and happy, in Rome, Italy. But she was, they were lovely people. But I was trying to contrast some of the odd people. There was a lovely old man over at the Virginia Episcopal High School that, Mr. Reid, he was an Englishman. And I was devoted to him, and I would go over real often in the afternoons and have tea with him, because, being English, he made delicious tea and he loved to have people drop in for tea. And when the war started he was very concerned because of course we weren't in it yet—that was when the Second World War started— So I said to him one day, Mr. Reid,

---

Page 11

goodness, they were bombing England, you know, and he was terribly disturbed about his relatives. And he was a man then in his eighties, nearly eighty. And I said, I declare, what do you think is the cause of all the trouble in the world. He said it was very simple, it was on account of the gasoline engine. He said as soon as we got away from horses the world began to go to hell. Well, he was absolutely convinced that everything was due to the gasoline engine. And, you know, he had rather old-fashioned ideas, and that's what he stuck to. All on account of the gasoline engine. But, you see, coming from Birmingham, which had been such a bustling place where everybody was striving to get ahead and get money, you know, and give big parties and impress people. The people in Virginia were so sure that they were the absolute top of the heap; they never doubted it, you know. If they were poor, they were still absolutely Virginian. And the atmosphere I'm trying to create was of people who were genteel, extremely genteel, and not rich, but beautiful manners and absolutely secure in the knowledge that they were Virginian. That nobody in the world could look down on a Virginian. They were just at the top of the heap. And I remember there was a woman that I went to see one time, whom somebody in Birmingham had asked me to go see, who was a cousin. This was Tinsley Harrison's relatives, you don't know who he is, you know the great doctor. Well, this is his mother asked me to go see the cousin. So I went there, and my heavens, here was this handsome woman with all this brood of handsome children. The windows were out, and it all looked like it was just a wreck. Some of the windows were out, and her poor old mother, or something, was huddling over a little wire. And she greeted me with perfect grace. So when I came back on a visit, I told Mrs. Harrison about her cousin and what a desperate time she was having. And she said that was on account of the fact that her grandfather'd been a gambler, or maybe it was her father, anyway she laid it all to the fact that there was a streak of gambling in the family and they'd lost alll their money. She said, you

---

Page 12

know, this cousin of mine has all the family silver—came from Virginia—and if she's in such a desperate condition—it must be worth several thousand dollars—when you go back, you ask her if I can buy the silver from her. Because that will give her . . . And they really were in a bad fix. So I went out there one cold, after Christmas, cold as it could be, and their house was freezing, and the old lady was crouched over the fire. They never had but the panes in the windows, you know they had wood in the windows. And I told the lady as nice as I could that her cousin in Alabama, Mrs. Harrison, would like to buy the family silver. I think Mrs. Harrison's name was Ella. She said, dear Ella wants that silver? Why it had never occurred to me that she'd like that silver. If she feels that way about it, I'll send it to her tomorrow. I said, but she wants to buy it from you. Oh, she said, I couldn't think of selling the family silver. She said, but I'll certainly share it with her, and give it to her if she feels strongly about it. You know, what could you do about that? She was not going to accept any money for the family silver, that was something that was sacred. Well, Virginia was a fascinating place to me because it provided a haven, if you know what I mean.

SUE THRASHER:

From the hubbub of Washington?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

From the hubbub of Washington. You'd go across the river to Seminary Hill and after the Zabriskie's came back, someone died, and we got a house next door. It was a very pleasant house. And we lived on, we finally bought a house. So we lived on Seminary Hill, you see, the whole eighteen years, or nineteen years, we were in Washington. It was a wonderful place for the children because they could range in this great territory, you know, it was so safe. It was a neighborhood. And when our little boy died, I can remember everybody coming over with jelly and custards and cake and casseroles. So on the social side, on the personal side, of pleasant living, it was just delightful, absolutely a

---

Page 13

lovely, delightful place to live. But they were as far removed from Washington as if they . . . they knew that there was a New Deal in Washington, and they knew that things were changing. . . .

SUE THRASHER:

There weren't a lot of people on the Hill besides yourself who worked in the New Deal?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

None, we were the first ones.

SUE THRASHER:

You were completely in the world of Old Virginia.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

You were completely in the world of Old Virginia. Now they began to move in, you see. Sister and Hugo finally moved, got a house out there, when he got put on the Supreme Court, but that comes later. No, we were the first ones. So we were received into this world of Old Virginia. And as I say, we were guaranteed by this Mrs. Randolph, who had known my mother in Birmingham, and it was a kind of a, you know, a guarantee that we would not create any disturbance, I suppose. But of course, we did. Everything that happened in Washington was such far removed, if you know what I mean.

SUE THRASHER:

So for the first year that you were on Seminary Hill, did you have much to do with Washington?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Not at all. I lived on the Hill. You see we lived in this lovely place, which was the Zabriskie house, which was very large, and we had lots of visitors—people were coming up all the time and staying overnight and having dinner with us.

SUE THRASHER:

People from Alabama?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Uh-huh. And then the family all came up and Cliff's family and some of my family. And of course Sister lived in Washington, too. See Hugo was in the Senate then from Alabama. But I was

---

Page 14

really more or less cut off from. . . .Sister took me to a lot of the official things, but I wasn't really part of it, you know, and after I'd done it once, I wasn't so anxious to do it any more because all those Washington receptions, unless you're really part of the group, you're just kind of an outsider looking on. But one thing that I did get freed from was that the ladies at the RFC—there were many people at the RFC whose wives were extremely ambitious and they were very ambitious men and they wanted very much to get into Washington society and get into you know, fashionable society, and they gave parties all the time. Well, lot of the ladies would give these luncheon parties, bridge parties, and tea parties, where you'd go and play bridge and have, you know, lunch at a hotel of . . . uh, those awful peas and half-done chicken lunches, you know. And they were just a horrible bore and, you know, very typical of the time . . . And I had this child and I was wanting to have another child, you see I'd had the two miscarriages. So I finally said to Cliff, I said, look, if your future depends on my going to these luncheons and teas and dinners that I'm invited to, I will but they are the most boring things in the wide world. A lot of strange women that play bridge and I don't know them, you know, I just don't . . . And he said, if my future depends on your playing bridge, I don't have much anyway, cause he said I was the poorest bridge player in the world. You know, bridge was just . . . So he said, he relieved me of that. Then a lot of the men that would come down wanting loans would want to take you out to dinner, you know.

SUE THRASHER:

Well now, was your behavior, your not wanting to go to these luncheons, was that looked upon as being odd by the other . . . ?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, I don't know if it was or not. I never did bother about it much, because, the thing was that I, you know, I didn't make any friends in the RFC particularly, except one named Alley, married Jim Alley—he was the head of the division. His father and my father'd been to school together, so there was a family

---

Page 15

connection there, and he married a beautiful girl named Esther, and I knew her quite well, but she was about the only friend I made in the RFC that I can recollect. But anyway, I was just relieved by Cliff from the awful burden, you know, of going to these boring lunches and teas. So then the first year we had this house on Seminary Hill and so my life was just encompassed really by Seminary Hill, and I really liked the people tremendously. They were . . . and I joined the Episcopal Church. Ann started going to this Episcopal Sunday School, and I'd go to the Ladies, they had a Ladies Auxiliary that met for tea every week. I went to that. I just loved it. It was a tremendous rest for me, you know. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

SUE THRASHER:

Did you find that society in Virginia similar to the Alabama aristocracy?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, you see, the Virginia society was so different from Birmingham. You see, Birmingham had a few people who were aristocrats, I mean they claimed that they hadn't done their washing, as my mother says, in several generations. They were freed of that. But the Virginia aristocracy, or the Virginia gentility, was much . . . I can't tell you because there was no competition. You know, they were just sure of themselves. They knew that if they were kin to the Randolphs or the Crawfords or the Patricks or the Jeffersons or the Washingtons . . . And my father would come to visit us quite often. I told you the story he told the Virginia ladies that shocked them so terribly. My father would come to visit us quite often and the ladies would have teas in the afternoon, all the ladies on the Seminary Hill, very pleasant, you know. Sit out in the garden if it was warm, then in the winter by a fire and have . . . And it was pleasant, you know, so I'd take Daddy with me, and he'd love to go. They'd always invite him because Daddy was very chatty, you know, and always made himself very pleasant. But he went to one Mrs. Walker's

---

Page 16

one afternoon when all the Seminary ladies were there. And he began to tell how he was from Virginia, and his family had come from South Boston and Virginia, you know. He was met with the usual sort of cool acceptance of the fact that you had left although you had left Virginia. So, I don't know whether he got irritated or whether he got, thought he was going to be funny. So he said, this conversation reminds me of a joke, they were talking about whether the Fairfaxes were kin to the Washingtons or the Washingtons were kin to the Randolphs or the Randolphs were kin to the, you know, so on and on. And Daddy said, out of the clear blue sky, this reminds me of a story from an old man up in Walker County, that's, you know, one of the roughest counties in Alabama, up here in the coal mining region. Said they were looking for a school, man to teach school, and said that they wrote up to the University of Virginia and the old man could hardly write, he got a tablet and a pencil and wrote up to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, and said, Dear Sirs, Beat 8 of certain district in Walker County is looking for a school teacher, and can you recommend a good young man? You know, we'd pay him $800, year basis, free board, whatever. So he got this beautifully written letter back. You know, beautiful handwriting and addressed properly and dear sirs, my name is St. John Randolph Washington Jefferson, or whatever, anyway a very old Virginia name, and on my mother's side I am connected to the Washingtons and on my father's side I'm connected to the Jeffersons and on my grandmother's side I'm connected to the Lees and on my great-grandmother's side I'm connected to the Fairfaxes. He gave them about four pages of his genealogy. And then he ended up by saying that he would like to apply to school teach at the school in Walker County. Well, the writing was very delicate, you know, beautiful, very legible, but very fine. So the school board got together and they read the letter and they figured out, figured out page by page. So they all started answering. And they discussed what

---

Page 17

to say. So the old man got out his tablet again and wet his pencil and he wrote back, you know, dear sir, University of Virginia, you know. Dear Sir, we have read your letter. N'en mind, you need'n come. We weren't lookin for no man down here for breedin' purposes jus' one to teach school.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

SUE THRASHER:

And this was at the Ladies' Auxiliary?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Yes, this was at the Ladies' Auxiliary, or ladies tea party. Nobody laughed, I can assure you of that. And Daddy was just disgraced. They really didn't think that was funny at all. Because they just spent hours developing these family themes. But they were lovely, sweet people on, you know, a personal level.

SUE THRASHER:

Now your father came from an old Alabama family. It must have not been totally alien for him.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, it wasn't, but the point was that they made him feel that being from Alabama was kind of a disgrace. If you weren't from Virginia, you know, you really didn't count. You didn't amount to a hill of beans unless you came from Virginia. Of course you could be away from Virginia temporarily, but to leave Virginia, to have your ancestors pick up and leave Virginia, they always thought there must have been something peculiar about you. So you see, what I've told you, I've lived in so many different levels. Here, by chance, we got in the middle of the most conservative, sort of genteel community in northern Virginia, where they'd lived there for generations, where the houses . . . You know, the old Mason house was there, you know, the Mason that went with Slidell to England. And so the first year until I got

---

Page 18

kind of used to Washington, I lived in this completely pleasant, genteel atmosphere and went to tea parties and I was trying to have a baby, that was one of the things. I was very anxious to get pregnant again and I did. And so the first year of so of my life . . . and then Cliff was gone so much, and I always had a servant. After Celeste left, I got somebody from up in Virginia. I always had a servant that lived on the place, you see, that had a room and a bath downstairs, so I wasn't alone. So I was free to go out quite a bit if I wanted to and I, as I've said a thousand times, when I think what I paid them, I feel a little . . . $8 and $10 a week, that was room and board and lodging, but even so that was very small wages. That was the usual wage.

SUE THRASHER:

Did Ann start to school there at the Seminary?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Yes, but Ann was only about three, about four when we went there. No, let's see, she was older than that because we were married in '26 and she was born in '27, and we went to Washington in '33, so she was 6. So she did start to school, oh and that was . . . She started at St. Agnes, that was the Episcopal school. there. I asked the ladies about the . . . of course St. Agnes was the only school they even thought about going to. The public schools, they said you couldn't even think of sending her to a public school because of the nits. All the children there had nits in their hair. And the public schools of Virginia were so bad that nobody went there, no nice person went there, so St. Agnes was the only school that they ever considered.

SUE THRASHER:

Was it like a private school?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Oh, it was a private school. It was run by the Episcopal Church. And we would have a car pool, and I'd pick up the Zabriskie's, or the Zabriskie's would pick up Ann or Margaret or Thompkins or, anyway we would all combine. So I lived my . . .

---

Page 19

I didn't come to in Washington. . . . I had met Mrs. Roosevelt and admired her very much, but I hadn't really come to in Washington, you know, to take hold of anything. But— Well, we spent the first summer in this lovely old house of the Zabriskie's. When they came back—they had about four children. And they were mostly boys, three boys and one girl. We would take them to school back and forth. And she was a lovely woman too. I never got to be a very dear friend of hers but I was very admiring of her and liked her very much. She was very active in the Seminary, the affairs of the Seminary. Then we had to move off the Hill. See, one professor had died, and they got another one was hired and there was no vacant house to rent, so we rented a house down off the Hill. And by the greatest luck in the world. Just by another great stroke of luck, my next door neighbor was Stella Landis. Stella Landis came from Mississippi. And she came . . . Did you ever read a book called "So Red the Rose" by Stark Young?

SUE THRASHER:

I remember you talking about it.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, it was written all about her family and about the plantation and you know that place they all had during the civil rights they had so much trouble down in south Mississippi? What was the name of that place? You know, Bob Zellner got beat up there. Macomb. Well, I think their plantation was near there. Anyway its all written up in a book called "So Red the Rose" by her cousin that was named Stark Young. And her mother's father had been Bishop Galloway, who was the presiding bishop of the Methodist Church of Mississippi. And Stella had gone to Millsaps College. And she was a tall, thin, I thought, beautiful girl, woman, and by some strange freak of fate, she had come up to Washington to look for a job. She didn't want to stay in Mississippi, and if you ever heard anybody strong against male oppression, she was. She had several brothers and maybe it was the Bishop too, but anyway she just felt the women in Mississippi were just treated, you know. And she wasn't one of the beautiful kind of floating southern belles, you know, She was tall and thin, and near-sighted and like me read a lot. We were sort of similar in a way, you know we were both tall and thin and read a lot and we were near-sighted.

---

Page 20

But Stella was beautiful. She had lovely sort of fluffy dark hair and great big grey eyes and white skin, and just thought she was absolutely lovely looking. She was married to Jim Landis. And Jim Landis, you know, came from, his people had been missionaries in China, and she came from, she came over here and went to Harvard, I believe. And he was so brilliant, you know. He was a sort of super-genius. And he got to be the Dean of the Harvard Law School at such an early age. And he was a Law Professor at Harvard. He had come down to work in the Securities and Exchange Commisssion. And he was the one that got to be, that worked with Joe Kennedy in the Securities and Exchange Commission. So she lived right next door and she had two little girls just about the age of my daughter, you know, Ann. But her Ann and my Ann were about the same age. And then Ellen came along and then you see Lucy came along. And so the little girls were the same age. And so she and I became absolutely devoted friends and her husband, Jim Landis, had been the law clerk for Justice Brandeis. So Stella loved to go up to the Supreme Court. See that was before Hugo had been put on the Supreme Court. He was still a senator. But Stella loved to go up to the Supreme Court and hear the cases. You know, she lived in this law school atmosphere and she knew a lot of the lawyers. And we would go up to the Supreme Court and Justice Brandeis' messanger, who was a Negro, you know all the messangers of the Supreme Court Justices were Negro men, he was devoted to her. We'd go up to the Supreme Court, you know. You'd go to the clerk's office, or wherever you went, and the messanger would come and usher us to the front seats. We would sit in—Mrs. Brandeis never came—so we would sit in Justice Brandeis' private enclave. You know I loved all that. I was this country girl from Alabama, you know, and I thought that was just lots of fun, you know. All the pomp and the ceremony and being ushered into the seats. And I began to enjoy Washington, you see. But then I also got interested in the law cases because you see all the great New Deal

---

Page 21

cases were being tried, the NRA case and the AAA case. So I also got very interested in the New Deal, the great cases that were being tried. Then Stella began to take me around with her on Monday afternoon to visit the Supreme Court Justices' wives. You see, the Supreme Court Justices' wives received on Monday. So we went to see Mrs. Brandeis a number of times, because she was crazy about Stella. Mrs. Brandeis was a perfectly marvelously interesting woman. She was perfectly beautiful. She must have been eighty, but she was still absolutely beautiful. She always wore cotton stockings. She said, you girls are very extravagant, I think, to wear silk stockings; I never wear silk stockings, unless it's an evening entertainment. But she was very devoted to Stella, and through Stella I got to know her, you know, as a second-hand relationship. But she was very nice to me. She began to invite Cliff and myself to the afternoon teas she'd have on Sunday afternoon, but that was more on account of Cliff than on account of me. You see, the Justice, Justice Brandeis, was very much interested in everything that went on, and he was particularly interested in all the recapitalization of the banks. And he and Max Loenthal had been very much interested. Max Loenthal was a brilliant man who was a great friend of Justice Brandeis who had helped recapitalize the railroads, I believe. But he was an extremely attractive man. But I've told you about going to Justice Brandeis' for tea, alll the pomp and ceremony. But the point was that it was really through Stella—then of course I got interested in what Cliff was doing—but I just gradually got interested in the New Deal.

SUE THRASHER:

This was sort of in your second year?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

This was in about the second or third year, it was the second year I was in Washington.

SUE THRASHER:

Had you had another child by that time? Had Lucy come by that time?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

No, it was my son. He was born then.

SUE THRASHER:

He was born about the second year you were in Washington?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

He was born about the second year I was in Washington. He was a beautiful boy. . . . Stella Landis . . . I began to go out, you know, to go to hearings. She also was interested in hearings. Stella had worked for the Scripts-Howard papers. And she was such a bright, interesting woman, so attractive that old-man Scripts had taken her around the world with him on his yacht. And this was certainly no scandal connected with that; he was about 87 then. But he found her such a delightful companion. And she was, I think, one of the most charming women I ever met in my life. And Cliff got to know Jim pretty well, because they'd go in the car together in the morning, but he never did like Jim much. He said Jim was one of the most cold-blooded, selfish people he'd ever met. He didn't think he was arrogant and cold-blooded in the sense . . . he was unaware, if you know what I mean. I don't mean he was deliberately cold-blooded and selfish; he was just unaware. He was that way with Stella. I remember the little girls went to St. Agnes, too, and when they would have plays or put on something, she would have to beg and beg Jim to come, you know, because they wanted their father to be there. Jim was just unaware. Whatever he did, he did with his entire concentration, you know, his entire mind. And he talked very little, but if you'd go there to dinner, if he drank a great deal, along about 12 o'clock, he'd start talking. And then he'd talk til 4 o'clock in the morning and be just absolutely brilliant. You know, he really was just shy and [unknown]. But by that time, we were just in a state of total exhaustion. He was a difficult husband, And then later, you know, he deserted her, left her. That's a long way into the future. But he was a very difficult husband. I always thought Cliff had a great awareness of character, and he judged people more by character

---

Page 23

than he did by their accomplishments really sometimes. Often he did, he'd judge them. And he never did really care for Jim very much. But anyway through Stella I did get interested in going up on the Hill to the hearings and I got interested in the New Deal. And of course through Hugo and Cliff, you know, just being up there, too, being free, able to get away on account of having servants. See, I had a yard man and a wash lady and a nurse and a cook. You know, it just seems impossible to think that here on $6500 you would have . . . I think he finally got raised to $7500 by the end of the first year, but that's the way you lived. By this time I had gotten to be a real New Dealer. Oh, I thought the New Deal was the most marvelous thing in the world. And I had met Aubrey Williams and Anita. You see, they lived in Arlington not very far from us. And I had met them, and we used to go over there on Sundays.

SUE THRASHER:

Now what did he do in the New Deal at that point?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Harry Hopkins was head of the WPA, and he was the assistant administrator of the WPA and he also got to be head of the NYA. The Williams had all these boys, you know; they had 4 boys, and they lived in Arlington County which was several miles from where we lived, but on the Virginia side. They had an old house. And they'd have these parties on Sunday. Oh, all kinds of people would come out. Anita was a wonderful cook, and a beautiful woman. I don't know if you've ever seen her or not. She's one of the prettiest women I ever saw. She was a real beauty, too, if you know what I mean, had perfect bone structure. And Aubrey was very gracious and funny and hospitable. His boys were attractive, and they'd have a bright fire, delicious food and drink. People would love to gather at the Williams' on Sunday afternoon. I met a lot of the New Dealers through that. And then I remember meeting Helen Gahagan Douglas there for the first time. She was another of the great beauties. She looked like a Greek goddess; she was just gorgeous. She was a sweet person, too, and very nice. Cliff was very admiring of her.

SUE THRASHER:

Was she married to Melvin Douglas at the time?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Uh-huh, yes. Then Pete Seegar I remember meeting there. Well, I'd met Pete first at the Highlander Folk School when he was a boy out of Harvard. Alan Lomax was there. You see the Seeger family lived in Washington.

SUE THRASHER:

Alan Lomax was where? At the Williams or at Highlander Folk School?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, I met him at the Williams. I met Pete first at Highlander. But they would bring their guitars there, and that was the beginning of the great folk music.. You see Alan Lomax's father was head of the folk music division of the Library of Congress, and Pete Seeger's father was head of the whole music division of the Library of Congress, I believe, I'm sure he was. Anyway, Pete and Alan were the founders of the folk music revival. Taping hadn't come in then; I don't think they even had electronic taping then. But they would go all over the country. When I first saw Pete, he had acne and a dirty sweatshirt on and a pair of dirty jeans and he'd left Harvard and he was going all over the country with a guitar collecting folk music. I just adored him from the very start. He's another pure character that I never had anything but praise and love for. I think he's a wonderful person. But they would come out to the Williams and play folk music. And then there was another place we got to go. Some beautiful girls rented a house next to us on Seminary Hill, and one of them married Tom Eliot.

SUE THRASHER:

She married Tom Eliot?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Congressman, he was a congressman from Massachusetts. He was the grandson of the president of Harvard. Her name was Lois, heavens she was one of my best friends and I can't remember what her name was before she married. But anyway, there were 7 or 8 of them that rented this house for the summer, and they were very attractive, very pretty girls. They all had jobs in the New Deal in one way or the other. Through them we got to know a lot of the younger kind of New Dealers, like Jim Rowe and Jerry Reilly —and he married one of these girls. There were just all sorts of young men that were coming out to visit these girls. And they would have square dances. There was lots of music there.

---

Page 25

And then another place that was a sort of center was Tom Corchran, you know who he was. They had what they called the "little red house" where a lot of the young bachelors lived, and they'd have parties. So we began to sort of make friends in the New Deal crowd, if you know what I mean, the ones what were doing things. So I got just absolutely to be a great New Dealer. I thought what they were doing was marvelous. And I thought the WPA and feeding the starving people . . . And then Clark Foreman appeared on the scene, and he was working in the Interior Department trying to find Negroes jobs. Well I had known him at Harvard, you see, and this was a big change in Clark. When I had known him he'd had no interest in those things at all that I knew of. So through him—you remember Will Alexander?—so I got to know some of the people in the agricultural division. Anyway I got to know a lot of these people in Washington who were in the New Deal, so I decided I wanted to do something. I had servants; I could leave the children at home for a morning or an afternoon without feeling any sense of great guilt. So I volunteered to be a worker in the women's division of the Democratic National Committee. And I asked Sister and Hugo if they thought that was all right. And they thought that was a good idea. There were two very nice southern girl named May Thompson Evans from North Carolina—she was working in the Women's Division. And then the head of it was named Dorothy McAlister—she came from Milwaukee, and her husband later became a judge, and she was an awfully nice woman. Two or three times a week I'd go down to the Women's Division of the National Democratic Committee, and I was a volunteer; I didn't get paid. And I'd clip newspapers and answer the telephone and do whatever volunteers were supposed to do. But it was lots of fun because Mrs. Roosevelt would come in quite often. There would be all kinds of women coming through. What they were trying to do at that time was to . . . The Women's Division of Democratic National Committee was trying to put into effect what they called the 50-50 plan, which is that all the Democratic

---

Page 26

Committees would be 50-50, 50 women, 50 men; they would have equal representation.

SUE THRASHER:

Was that considered a radical proposal?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Oh, God, yes. I should say it was. Because in the southern states there was not a single woman on a single Democratic committee. The Democratic National Committeewomen were usually sort of pretty southern women that wore big hats and would sing Dixie.

SUE THRASHER:

Whose idea was this, the 50-50?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, Mrs. Roosevelt and there was somebody named Molly—what was her name; she came from New York state—and Dorothy McAlister and May Thompson Evans, all these women that were working in the Women's Division were working on the 50-50 plan. So they were particularly worried about the South because there were no southern women on any Democratic committee, I mean local, city, state, anything. They were just completely outside. So they got particularly worried about the South. So they made quite a study of it. They said that the thing that was wrong was the poll tax. The poll tax in all the southern states, you see, had been put on after the Populist uprising, around 1900, when they disenfranchised the Negroes by the white primary and by the poll tax, but they also disenfranchised the poor whites. You see, no women voted. Women didn't start voting until 1920. Very few women voted because if a man, a poor tenant farmer if he had scraped up a dollar and a half to pay his poll tax, he sure as hell wasn't going to pay a dollar and a half for his wife. And they never had any money. And then in Alabama you know, the poll tax was retroactive. If you started voting when you were forty-five, you had to pay 35 dollars because you had to pay back every year you'd missed.

SUE THRASHER:

Was it retroactive in a lot of other southern states?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, it was retroactive in Virginia for three years back, but in Alabama it was retroactive from the time you were 21 years old. Now I think the highest proportion of voting was in Texas, which was about 31%, but then it got down to 12% in Mississippi. Now this was the proportion of people who voted of voting age; this wasn't the proportion of population. This was the people who were eligible to vote over 21. So the South was just run by an oligarchy composed of

---

Page 27

whites, usually middle-aged, gentlemen, or men, some of them were gentlemen and some of them weren't. But in any case Mrs. Roosevelt at that time had a very high voice; you know she had voice lessons and she really squeaked, like Squeaky Fromm. But she had that high, very high-pitched voice. But I just became devoted to her. I thought she was a wonderful woman, just a great person. And the women in the Democratic Division were devoted to her. And old Mrs. Daisy Harriman would sweep in. You don't remember her. She was a great figure in the Democratic Party. She became an ambassador, I think, later to Sweden or Denmark. She was a very handsome woman and gave a lot of parties. She would sweep in. But it was an interesting lot of women, you know, extremely interesting. So I became very fond of them. But now there were no Negroes around. There was absolutely not one single black person around the Democratic National Committee that I ever saw. It was about 1934, I reckon, '35. I was born in 1903, so I was about 30, I suppose. I was a young woman. So we were working quietly along on this 30-30 [sic] thing, and then, I mean the 50-50 thing, and then the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee began the onslaught on the poll tax.. They were saying we had to get rid of the poll tax. They were getting out literature against the poll tax and sending out literature and trying to get somebody on the Hill to introduce a bill, you know, to get rid of the poll tax, and trying to get the States to get rid of the poll tax. And the poll tax got to be a great political issue. Well, one day I went down as my volunteer to the Democratic National Committee, and everybody looked like there was a death in the family, and it seems that the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Jim—the big Irishman who later got to be head of the Coco-Cola Company; he's still alive; he was the campaign manager for Roosevelt—Farley, of course. Jim Farley was a great, big overpowering fellow from New York, you know, big Irishman and very genial and all the men were crazy about him. His wife never did come to Washington. They'd come from very humble origins, and she was very sensitive. She came to Washington one time and gave a party and nobody came or something happened; I never was invited, so I don't remember.

---

Page 28

I just remember Mrs. Farley never came back to Washington after that any more. And you know the break actually between Farley and Roosevelt came because Mrs. Farley thought Mrs. Roosevelt snubbed her. Mrs. Roosevelt was rather unconscious herself I think at times because I'm sure it never crossed her mind to snub Mrs. Farley, but you know she was such a busy woman and she was into everything and she was just so different from most Presidents' wives. So Mr. Farley had come down to see Dorothy McAlister and then he had gone to the President of the United States and said if you don't shut up these damn women in the Democratic Committee, it's just making trouble on the Hill with the southern senators and congressmen.

SUE THRASHER:

Because of the poll tax, not because of the 50-50?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

They weren't going to pay any attention to that anyway, particularly when women didn't vote, not enough to make any difference. But he was getting terribly upset about the poll tax because it was kind of catching on. No bills had been introduced, but it was beginning to sort of catch on. So now we come up to the year of '36, when Roosevelt won by the greatest majority in history. I don't know whether Lyndon Johnson got a bigger vote in '64 or not but anyway in '36 Roosevelt won his second term for President by the biggest majority at that time had ever been known. He won every state except Maine and Vermont, I believe. And in the meantime, you know, the Wagner Act had been passed to unionize the South, I mean people could unionize. It was part of the NRA, you know, section 7a. But then when the NRA was declared unconstitutional, they saved the Wagner Act—he was a senator from New York. That was passed, which meant that they set up a labor board, you know, and people could organize without being beat up or put in jail like Bull Connor did. So the South was awfully agitated about that because you see cheap labor was their great selling point, to industry, to come down where you've got cheap Anglo-Saxon, happy, powerless people to work for you for a whole lot less than they would in New York or New England. And a

---

Page 29

lot of the cotton mills had begun to move down South. A lot of those vacant towns you see in New England today like Fall River, all those mills that had moved South, you see. The point was that Farley just raised hell. Well, Mr. Roosevelt was having enough trouble getting his things through anyway. You know the southerners had begun to—The WPA and the NYA and all these things that were giving these niggers, paying them $2 a day or a dollar a day. Ed Smith, Cotton Ed Smith, said, ain't no nigger never worth more than 50¢ a day. And he was having trouble with all the southerners in the Congress and Senate anyway. And a lot of them you see were the heads of the committees, they were the big shots. So he sent word through his wife. I don't think Farley ever gave us enough attention to come down and see us in the Division; he went to Roosevelt. Mr. Roosevelt told Mrs. Roosevelt all those women down there to cool it, to lay off the poll tax. Well, we had a real indignation meeting, you know. We really were perfectly indignant about it. Anyway we had this big indignation meeting. So this was in '36. He had just won the election. In the meantime you know, he'd lost the Supreme Court fight, about enlarging the Supreme Court, because they'd also been blocking his measures. So he launched the famous purge; you remember the purge? He decided that he himself would go out—he'd won this tremendous victory—and he would go out and he would try to defeat some of these people who'd been blocking all his programs. I think he defeated O'Connor in New York; I think he got him beat. But he came South, and the first one he attacked was Senator George of Georgia. And he made that famous speech I believe at Millegeville, near Warm Springs, where he had his winter place there. And it was the greatest gathering you could imagine of people. And he said, with Senator George sitting right on the platform, that—you see, Fascism was rising in Europe then, there was Mussolini and the Spanish War was going on then and of course Hitler was rising in Germany. So Roosevelt—it's really one of the greatest speeches of all time— said that fascism and feudalism were very much the same.

---

Page 30

He said that fascism was rising in Europe and that the South was feudalistic. And really feudalism and fascism were very much the same, which meant that the society was controlled by a very small oligarchy, you know, and people did't have any rights and freedoms and powers. Oh, it was a powerful speech. Well, not only did Mr. George get reelected, but he got reelected by the biggest majority there'd ever been in Georgia because everybody in Georgia got perfectly furious and said that here was the President coming down telling them who to vote for, you know. And he had sent Clark Foreman down there, who was a native southerner, you see, he'd been working in the Interior Department trying to get Negroes jobs. He sent him down there to kind of look after the campaign. I forget the man who ran against Senator George. He was a governor or something, a New Dealer. But he got beat so bad, and none of Clark's friend would speak to him. And his uncle, who owned the Atlanta Constitution, would never put his name in the paper as Clark Howell Foreman; he always called him Dr. C. H. Foreman. They stayed down there several months. Oh, it was just swamped, I mean, all their old friends, the Piedmont Driving Club and all the people he'd grown up with and gone to the University with wouldn't have a thing to do with him. No, he was on the wrong side. And Clark, I wish you could have interviewed him about his experiences there. They were rough; and Marian came from Canada, and she had such exquisite manners. She was so gracious. So they had a rough time of it. Anyway, all the southerners he tried to beat, Cotton Ed Smith and Senator George, I don't know whether he took on Bilbo then or not— anyway, they all won. They won overwhelmingly. The purge was a total failure as far as the South was concerned. In the meantime the labor unions were having a terrible time. They were being beat up and put in jail and held incommunicado, and Bull Connor would just throw them in jail and hold them there for six or 8 months—they never would see anybody. A lot of them were killed; nobody knows how many were killed.

SUE THRASHER:

This is the steelworkers organizing in Birmingham?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Yes, but not only in Alabama; it was all over the South. And this was the time of the textile strikes

---

Page 31

and when they were having the flying squadrons. And there were machine guns around all the cotton mills.

SUE THRASHER:

And how much of this were you hearing at the Women's Democratic Division?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Oh, well, I was hearing a lot of it there, but it was all over you know. This was a great crisis, because Roosevelt had put his prestige on the line to change the South, to try to get rid of this bloc that was defeating him on all of his measures, you see. Then Hugo Black came up with the idea of the wage and labor act, which put a ceiling under wages at 25¢ an hour. Well, that just nearly drove people into spasms because they were paying them 10¢ an hour in the turpentine camps and on the sharecroppers and the day labor particularly in the Black Belt with the Negro, you know, 50¢ a day was the going wage there. You see, it was the resistance of the Old South against all this stuff coming down South, paying people good wages and having unions; the Negro would get big ideas. The whole thing was that after the Civil War the sad thing was that the South attracted industry on the basis of cheap wages. There used to be advertisements in all the papers, you know, about the contented . . . low wage, white, contented labor. Well, in any case—

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well in any case

SUE THRASHER:

Now you're still working daily?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

I'm not working daily. I used to go down and volunteer. By that time I had two children; I had three because Lucy had come along by that time. So I had three children; I wasn't quite as free. I still had help, but I wasn't quite as free.

SUE THRASHER:

I don't know whether we went back to this meeting the women had after Farley passed the word down.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

We just had this meeting. So we discussed an idea of setting up an independent committee to abolish the poll tax. It never came to anything out of the Democratic Committee, but the idea was we would set up an independent committee. But then what happened was that after Roosevelt had been beaten so badly in his purge and after the labor unions were having such a hard time—that's when Ida Sledge got run out of Mississippi and Joe Gelders got beat up. Well, then the La Follette committee began to investigate the violations of the Wagner Act. Bob La Follette was from Wisconsin, the son of the old Bob La Follette and he was a friend of Sister's and Hugo's and I had met him several times there at dinner, and I thought he was an awful nice fellow—had an awfully nice wife. So I got absolutely absorbed in the La Follette committee. I would go up every morning and stay there all day long, because they were investigating the violations of the Wagner Act, and Harlan County and the steel workers and the automobile workers. This book of Jeremy Brecker's has some of it in it. But there was terrible violence and fires and Pinkertons and detectives and arsenals. All of this was new to me, you know. I had seen the poverty in Alabama, but never the violence. I had never seen, and I was just terribly shocked at this. And then when they got to the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company in Birmingham, Alabama, then I really was just shocked out of my mind. See, I had never known Joe Gelders, although he had been in college with Cliff at the University of Alabama. But you see he had come down and was head of something called the Southern Civil Rights Committee, who tried to get prisoners out of jail.

SUE THRASHER:

What do you mean when you say "he had

---

Page 33

come down"?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

He was teaching at the University of Alabama, teaching physics. And when the depression came, he was completely unpolitical. He was married to Ester Frank, who was a beautiful girl from Montgomery—she taught English. And they were a very popular young couple at the University of Alabama, but both of them totally unpolitical. Joe had been raised in Birmingham; his father was quite a wealthy man. He had a brother named Lewis Gelders, whom I'd gone to school with all my life, who married one of the Gussen girls. Mrs. Gussen was quite a famous character in Birmingham. She was a music teacher. But Lewis married one of the Gussen girls, and Joe married Ester Frank from Montgomery. And then they had a sister named Emma, who married one of the Sterns from Anniston. They were a wealthy family, and Emma had gone to Smith. She was older than I was, but Emma Gelders was extremely bright, and she belonged to a group of girls in Birmingham who were older than I was. We always called them the Bluestockings because they'd all been graduated from college, Mary Parkland, Martha Toolmin, and Amelia Worthington. And they discussed books. And they were suffragettes, too! They believed in women's suffrage. And so I knew them, but I didn't know them well. Anyway, Joe Gelders and Ester were down at the University. And when they began the program—this was a New Deal program, too—when Henry Wallace got to be with the Agriculture Department, they began to kill the pigs and plow up the corn and cotton to raise the prices. You see the price was down to nothing. So they destroyed, you know, pigs; they killed them. And they plowed up cotton; they plowed up the corn. But Joe Gelders, who was totally unpolitical, he saw all around him in Tuscaloosa people starving, you know, and nothing to wear, and living just barely from hand to mouth. See, I cannot describe to you young people about the rickets and pellagra and the worms and the hookworm, because you say you've never seen it. Well, I saw it and he saw it: people who were just on the last go-round. When you see a child that's shaking all over with rickets because they don't get any protein, it's a pretty horrible sight. See, I saw all that—I told you before—when I worked in the Junior League

---

Page 34

in Birmingham. We were taking the Red Cross around, and I saw people with these great white blotches of pellagra. First time I saw it, I thought they had—oh, that terrible disease, in the Bible—leprosy. I thought they had leprosy; it scared me to death. I really did. See I never . . . You see the black people would have these great white blotches on them, too, from pellagra.. And the white people would have these blotches. It came from pellagra. And they all looked yellow and drawn. And the ones with hookworm . . . You know Aubrey Williams came from the country, and he had a lot of relatives poor as Job's turkey. They were poor as they could be. And I'd say, what'd they do. And he'd say, well, they'd just sit and spit all day.

SUE THRASHER:

And that's from hookworm?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

From hookworm. They were so diseased and lazy. Everybody said the southerners were so lazy; they didn't like to get out and work. Well, they had hookworm and they had all these parasitic diseases and nutritional diseases. You never saw them. And you never saw the children in the mill villages that worked in the cotton mills. You see it took me—I was twenty-odd years old before I waked up to it and it was right around me. And of course you never saw it. But after I did see it, it got me stirred up. So Joe Gelders saw all this and he got terribly upset. It was just the irrationality of killing pigs when people were hungry and plowing up cotton when they didn't have anything to wear. And you know they were burning wheat in the Midwest. It was the destruction of things trying to raise the price. So he didn't know a thing about economics. He had never read a book on economics in his life. So he went to the library and began to read economics. And he started out with Adam Smith, I think. Anyway, he went right on through. He read all the books he could find on economics. He read the Beards, you know, Charles and Mary Beard. He went right on through the economics shelf. So finally he got to the socialists, the Webbs. Did you ever try to read the Webbs book, from England? They were Fabians. Well, he read the Webb book. I read them in Wellesley, and they were hard reading. But they stirred me up a little bit there, but not much. But anyway, he

---

Page 35

finally got up to Engels and Marx. And he said, this is it! He said this is the answer to all this poverty and all of this killing the pigs and burning up the corn and cotton. So he began to have people come up to the house. And he'd go around and tell everybody that he'd found the answer to the depression, and it was capitalism. And you had to have Marxism.

SUE THRASHER:

Was he still in Tuscaloosa at the time?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Sure, he was still teaching at the University. He was just converted by reading these books. He never met a Marxist in his life, or a socialist either.

SUE THRASHER:

He was not even in the Party at this time?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

He never knew there was a party. He never heard of it. You know, he was just completely blank. He read it, and he decided that this was the answer to poverty—socialism, or Marx and Engels anyway. It was all theoretical, you see, because he had no contact. The idea of people killing pigs and burning up cotton and corn when people were starving; well, it's rather simple to comprehend that something's wrong anyway. So Joe began having these meetings at his house. And the next year they told him they didn't want him to come back. Well, he was very much surprised. Now I may not have all this straight, but this is my understanding of it. So he went up to visit his sister, Emma Gelders, who married one of the Sterns from Anniston, and he was a very rich man—Roy Stern—I mean he had a big salary. He was a lawyer. They lived on Long Island someplace, and they had a big house. They had two girls, Barbara and Ann. So they were very conservative kind of intellectual—kept up with everything but not radical in the least. So Joe began to take courses and he looked up the Communist Party and he got in with the radicals in New York at that time—made contacts with them. So they told him—and of course I don't know who he dealt with; all of this is just hearsay—I mean knowledge from my own personal standpoint. But I know he did get in contact with the radicals in New York. Now he always said he never actually joined the Communist Party, in that he was a card-carrying member—maybe they thought it was better for him not to. Anyway, they told him the best thing he could do was come South and try to help these

---

Page 36

people being thrown in jail. You see, these were the labor organizers. John L. Lewis at that time was head of the CIO—and he was using these young people, like these young civil rights workers, and some of them were Communist. And he would send them down as sort of shock troops. Of course he never let a Communist in the Miners' . . . or a woman either, you knew that. But he sent them down as shock troops, and they'd go to these little towns and try to organize and they'd get killed and beat up. And then in Birmingham where they tried to organize the steel workers they were thrown in the jail and held incommunicado. You see, Bull Connor had been head of the Steel Police; the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Rail Company had a private police force, the Steel Police. So he went from being head of the Steel Police of the TCI to being the head of the Police Department of Birmingham, Alabama. And they were fighting them like they were fighting fire. [interruption]

SUE THRASHER:

He's now up in New York with his brother-in-law, Roy Stern.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

And his sister Emma. So he stayed there that summer. I didn't know him and I don't know how long he stayed in New York. He stayed in New York several months. Anyway, he came down here . . . I think it was part of the Labor Defense League in the National Labor Defense League, but they didn't call it that; they called it the Southern Civil Defense League, or something like that. It was to defend the people who were being put in jail.

SUE THRASHER:

And Gelders worked for that?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Yeah, he was head of it. He had an office, in Birmingham. And then his wife in the meantime had been fired from the University, or left—I don't remember if she was fired or what. And she came and worked with him as his secretary. And they were always bringing lawsuits. He was part of Ted's [Rosengarten] book; he's mentioned in there, you know, as having come down in that case of the sharecropper in Tallassee. In any case, these people who—one of them I met years later; I met him in—it was a strange coincidence. He was Don West's brother-in-law. He was married to one of Don West's sisters. And he had come down here as an early Communist organizer and was thrown into the jail in Bessemer and beat up terribly and had tuberculosis. And then he was sent out to Colorado. And I forget even how I met him. It must have been

---

Page 37

at some meeting I met him, at the Southern Conference or something. I met him on the street in that short time we lived in Denver. I remembered him and I couldn't remember his name. I spoke to him and told him who I was and asked him about . . . He may have known me, but that was a part of his life that he had wiped out and he didn't want to even remember—he didn't want to even be reminded of it. He must have suffered terribly, and he just wanted to be completely free of it. They were tortured, I'm sure. He couldn't even get in contact with anybody, a doctor—now I don't know how many of them died. This was all over the South. A little later when I'd got to know Miles and Jim through the Southern Conference and would go to the Highlander, they'd come to the Highlander all beaten up and bleeding. Miles has all of that. And John L. Lewis was coming down to see; he was the—what do they call it in the last chapter of Revelations when the monster comes out of the sea and the world and all. They were all preaching that, you know, and John L. Lewis was the monster. Well, anyway, Joe Gelders was down here. His wife wasn't with him at the time he got beat up.

SUE THRASHER:

Now this is the late 30's?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

No, no, this is about '36 or '37.

SUE THRASHER:

Why do you think Gelders had not heard more about the Party since the Party did have people down here during that time?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

He came from wealthy, rich people—his father made a lot of money. He was a very successful businessman. He hadn't ever come in contact with any radicals in his life, I don't suppose, just like me. And you see I was all confused about Communism and Bolsheviks. They called Hugo Bolshevik all the time because he represented the labor unions, and I just took it as a matter of course that if you belonged to the labor union you were a Bolshevik. All the time Hugo was running for the Senate, you see, in '26 he was being called the Bolshevik, and all the people were coming around trying to tell Daddy and Mother not to let Sister marry him because he was a Bolshevik—he represented the labor unions. So I just naturally assumed that anybody that was a union member was a Bolshevik. I didn't know what a Bolshevik was exactly. He [Joe Gelders] had no contact with steel workers or coal mining people or working people. You see we lived on the

---

Page 38

South Side there around Birmingham—now of course the best residential districts are over the mountain in Birmingham. Five Points was the good residential district and around Highland Avenue. We never came in contact with any working people, except Negroes who worked in the house or a plumber maybe or somebody to fix the furnace. The town was just divided. He came back to Birmingham and in the meantime Bull Connor had been made head of the Birmingham Police Department. And they got the head of the National Guard; he was head of the Steel Police—his name was . . . [unknown] It'll come to me, too. I miss Cliff so much because he could always